Word: stores
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...schultz was working in his native New York City for a housewares company when he first traveled to Seattle and stepped inside Starbucks--a narrow store with a worn wooden counter and bins of coffee beans--which sat across the street from Seattle's waterfront Pike Place Market. The aroma and romance captured his imagination, as the well-told story goes, and after a year of begging for a job, he was hired to do marketing. Two years later, a trip to Milan led to more inspiration. He returned to Seattle convinced that Starbucks should start opening espresso bars...
...Starbucks went public with 140 stores, and from practically the very beginning, the company expanded at a breakneck pace, growing store count 40% to 60% a year. It wasn't just about coffee. Starbucks took care of its employees as well as its beans. In an almost unheard-of move for a food retailer, the company offered health insurance, a costly policy that Schultz insisted on; as a child, he had watched his family's finances crumble when his father suffered a broken ankle at his job as a delivery-truck driver...
...faster, moving customers through lines more quickly. Drive-throughs became standard, and the company released its first CD. Smith's successor was a Wal-Mart veteran, Jim Donald, who took the company into books, movie promotions and oven-warmed breakfast sandwiches, which added about $35,000 to the average store's $1 million annual sales...
...wasn't recession-proof," says Bear Stearns analyst Joseph Buckley. The summer of 2007 was particularly bad because of consumers' growing boredom with Frappuccinos, which make up about 15% of sales, according to UBS analyst David Palmer. Then, in the quarter ending in September, traffic at established U.S. stores fell 1%, the first drop ever. The next quarter, traffic dropped again--down 3%--and comp-store sales fell 1%, the first time Starbucks had ever swung negative...
...just Schultz who's back. It was as if he were reassembling the band: Roberts, the merchandising guru; Wanda Herndon, who left in 2006 but returned to run global communications; and Arthur Rubinfeld, the company's first vice president for store development, who has known Schultz since the two were in their 20s. Schultz holed up with them and others he'd promoted from within at the Palace Ballroom in downtown Seattle for three days of 14-hour strategy sessions. The retreat started by listening to Beatles music and talking about how great icons reinvent themselves...